Mad
Our guest speaker for the first AWC meeting of the year canceled today, last minute. The meeting is TOMORROW. She wasn’t ready to present, and had been expecting me to get in touch with her a week ago, even though we confirmed the date and logistics AND topic FOUR months ago. Now we have no one even though we have been scrambling all day to find a replacement. ARGH. I got in touch with her a few days ago, but because it wasn’t a week, she didn’t feel prepared.
Bad
While filing a huge pile of home paperwork today, which included tax info, pension statements, bank statements, report cards, and old bills, I found a bill from Skatteverket (Swedish Tax Authority) for income tax from last year that apparently got missed and is now a couple of months late. AAGH.
Sad
Someone who I read, and like very much, even though I’ve never met her and she has probably no idea who I am at all, posted today that her relationship, which seemed to be in excellent working order, is over. I don’t even know her and it makes me sad.
Sad
Anders is gone, which always gets me a little down. He’s on a ski trip with a bunch of work colleagues in the Czech Republic, and hopefully having fun, though he said the snow wasn’t great.
Sad
My brother-in-law’s brother passed away yesterday morning. I don’t know the details, but he’s understandably devastated and I feel awful for him and my sister’s family.
Sad
Martin and I finished watching the last season of Lie to Me on Friday and I’m sad it got canceled (even if that’s old news, since it was canceled in 2011). We zip-watched the first half of Mad Men season 7 over the weekend and now we have nothing on the agenda. (I know, this one isn’t even close to any of the others, but still, it adds to my cumulative mood)
Edited to add: After checking the bank statements, the income tax bill DID get paid, so I can move that to the GLAD column. Whew!
***
This is a crazy busy week coming up. AWC meeting tomorrow, Department kick off all day and evening on Thursday and then I’m hosting an AWC event at my home on Friday: a jewelry swap/shop. It should be fun, I hope. I invited all the ladies at work as well and several of them are coming, so Wednesday has to be the big grocery shop AND I have to see if my husband will help me out with some of the food prep before the event or I will really be scrambling.
I thought of it all by myself and I’m kind of proud of the idea. (Maybe not as proud as of Pie Night which, by the way, is officially on the 2015 calendar for March 6: Save the date!). There are several young women in the club who are good friends (and who, not incidentally, remind me of ME and MY friends from *cough* 17 years ago when we were their ages) who get together a lot, and one of them happened to mention that they often have clothes swap parties. I had thought of doing something similar some years ago but never got it off the ground because I knew that it would be difficult size-wise. Why throw a clothes swap party if you won’t be able to wear anything your participants are likely to bring, after all?
But it stuck in the back of my head and recently, while I looking for something in my jewelry box, it hit me: why not do a JEWELRY swap? I don’t know about you but I have a TON of old jewelry that I never wear, that is just sitting uselessly inside my jewelry box. It’s not the super-good stuff (which I wouldn’t part with since I will give it to my daughter someday), but I have a LOT of decent (or not) costume stuff that someone else might like.
So I put it up on the calendar and invited everyone to clean out their jewelry boxes and bring their baubles to swap, sell or give away. I set a price limit of SEK 100 per piece for those who want to sell stuff, as I didn’t want this to be for expensive things. I have one friend who sells pearls from China, and another acquaintance who makes glass jewelry but both of them assured me they had plenty that would work under the price limit and of my own stuff that I’ve gathered and set aside, there’s nothing that I care about so much that I need to sell it. Whatever doesn’t go, I will put in the flea market bag.
Karin already went through the basket of jewelry that I cleared out and absconded with the best pieces, so I’m afraid most of what I have left isn’t going to move (the 80s called and wants those beads back). But so what, it will be fun anyway. I’m serving soup and chili. I am glad to have this waiting for me at the end of the week.